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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2002
Lula wins in Brazil
Workers’ Party (PT) candidate Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva
won 61% of the vote in the Oct. 27 presidential runoff election in Brazil,
defeating José Serra of the currently governing Brazilian Social Democracy
Party (PSDB), who mustered a meager 39%. Brazil’s currency, the real, has lost 40% of its value
over the past five months, partly due to U.S. investors’ fears of a Lula
presidency. Their attitude towards Brazilians electing a former labor leader who
founded the PT in 1980 was expressed by George Soros in an August interview with
a Sao Paulo financial magazine: “In the Roman Empire only the Romans voted. In
modern global capitalism, only the Americans (sic) vote. Not the Brazilians.” Lula's astounding margin of victory--no Brazilian president
has ever come to power with such a large percentage of the vote--reflects the
desire of the Brazilian masses for radical change. Brazil suffers from some of
the most unequal income distribution of any country, and most of its 175 million
people have gained little or nothing from the neoliberal policies of the past
decade. The unemployment rate of Sao Paulo (the country's largest
city) is over 20%. Over 50 million people are living in abject poverty. Despite
being Latin America’s economic powerhouse, three times the size of Argentina
and four times the population, hunger is rampant in Brazil due to the focus on
agribusiness for export. One schoolteacher expressed a widely-held view that
explains the margin of the PT's electoral victory: "It's time to give Lula
a chance, because the present approach clearly isn't working." Lula will be Brazil's first working class president. At age
12 he went to work full time, first in an office and later as a worker in a
metallurgical plant. In 1975 he became president of the metalworkers union in
Sao Bernardo do Campo. He then became famous in the late 1970s for leading a
series of strikes that led to his arrest and imprisonment. Some of the Brazilian business elite have tried to
accommodate themselves to Lula. They furnished him with a running mate, José
Alencar, a textile tycoon who has amassed a personal fortune of $500 million.
Lula points out that Alencar is “not just any businessman,” he’s a good
nationalist, well equipped to defend Brazil’s interests on the global stage.
Alencar, for his part, claims that he is committed to improving the living
conditions of workers, the “source of all the wealth that has flowed out of
the country” in the past decade. Lula has told the MST (Landless Workers’ Movement), which
now exists in 23 of Brazil’s 26 states and has some 500,000 families, that
illegal land seizures will no longer be permitted once he is in power, as
supposedly his land reform will be sufficient to fix the unequal land
distribution (only Paraguay’s is worse). He denies that the composition of the
PT has shifted from its radical working class origins, formed in 1980 on the
basis of its slogan "the party without bosses.” Lula says the PT won, not because it has abandoned its
principles, but because the Brazilian electorate has become radicalized after
two terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration. The coming weeks will
put that view to the test. --Mitch Weerth |
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